Chapter One: The Dead Client

“No,” said the wizard Iskola, pointing a polished fingernail toward her half-sister, Luma. “Not you.”

Luma sank further into her characteristic shoulder-slump. Though older than Iskola, she looked younger. She owed her callow appearance, at least in part, to the elven blood which her five siblings, children of her father and stepmother, did not share. Together, her lithe frame, wide eyes, and boyish figure conspired to hang about her neck an unshakable air of adolescence. Her siblings, who were also her teammates, had learned—or perhaps been taught, by her unkempt red hair, her shrinking posture, her downcast gaze—to treat her not as a woman, but as the runt of the litter. It was her own damn fault, but that realization had so far not helped her one whit in altering the way they regarded her.

Iskola, her black-clad body a thin and twisted reed, towered over Luma. Her headpiece, a complex of lacquered, intertwining loops constructed from her own raven hair, magnified the imperious effect. A stiff laced collar and dark fingerless gloves, also of lace, completed the outre look the city of Magnimar relished in its highborn magicians.

Luma forced herself into a rigid posture. “We’re to guard a gem from thieves, and you want to leave behind the mind-reader?”

Iskola sighed. “No one wants a mind-reader, and you’d be best to stop describing yourself as such. Go back to calling yourself a streetseer if you must. Or citywalker. Or cobblestone druid. Those are all strange enough.”

“I wasn’t proposing to introduce myself, period.”

Iskola’s hand flitted out, as if tempted to seize one of Luma’s stray hanks of hair and tuck it back into place. She aborted the gesture, locking hands behind her narrow waist. “When Lord Vetillus hires Magnimar’s most expensive city warriors to stand sentry at his soiree, we are as much a signal of his prestige as is the Bandu Emerald. Were any of his guests to so much as infer that one of us was busy trawling their innermost mental wanderings, we would be failing our duty.”

“And giving cause for a refund.” Arrus, the squad’s swordsman and Iskola’s twin, squared his broad shoulders and jutted his blocky chin.

“Honestly, Luma.” Iskola bustled in her whickering skirt toward the squad room door. “When people learn you perform the magic of the streets, they assume you were born on them. Until you learn to present yourself as a scion of a founding house, simple wisdom forces us to exclude you from certain missions.”

Luma scanned the others for flickers of sympathy. Eibadon, the family ecclesiast, settled his jowly features into an imperturbable dullness. Ulisa, robed master of the unarmed fighting arts, held fast to her serenity, even as a yellow moth flitted around her shaved head. Only Ontor—top-knotted, leather-clad—let a glimmer of feeling hint across his long and hawkish face.

“Mouse,” he said, “Think of it as being excused from an evening of apocalyptic boredom.”

“Read one of your books,” Arrus said, and departed, carrying the others in his wake.

Luma followed him into the manor hallway, hung with portraits of each Lord Derexhi, from its legendary founding warrior Aitin to her father, Randred. Next to the painting of a heroic, virile Randred stood the real man, his brow creased, his beard now gray and wild.

“Let them go,” he said, voice feather-soft. Father and daughter watched the rest of the squad troop down the stuccoed hallway. “Ontor may have been right. About the boredom of that assignment.”

“Listening in, I see.”

Dimples broke across the old warrior’s face. “The successful man of arms pays close heed to his forces. Doubly so when they’re his children.” He patted her shoulder. “What say we show them up, and give you a juicy task?”

Luma rarely gets the respect she deserves.

Randred guided her to the library, where he poured her a goblet of Riverspire red and topped up his own to match.

Luma sipped. The wine was subtle and deep, with a caky finish. “Juicy, you say?”

“Well…” Randred eased into his favorite chair. “No doubt I exaggerate. But you’ll be working for a dead man. That’s a novelty, at least.”

Luma perched on the arm of his chair. “Who’s the dead man, and what am I to do for him?”

Randred reached over to a side table for a contract inscribed on a sheet of vellum. “The client’s name is—or was—Aruhal. A retired explorer of some kind. One with enemies, apparently. Several years ago, he placed a standing order for us to perform an investigation for him, to be triggered in, quote, “the event of my untimely demise,” unquote. We are to ascertain if his death was natural or not. Further instructions apply if we find he was in fact murdered.”

“Which are?”

“An agent of House Derexhi is to secure the funerary urn containing his ashes and place it in front of his killer.”

∗∗∗

As Luma stepped out onto the Derexhi House portico, the citysong came to her, its manifold voices rushing to fill her mystic awareness. Its harmonies manifested not only sounds, transmitted through magical connection to her mind’s ear, but accompanying sensations as well. The dominant notes were those of her own neighborhood and present location, the Marble District. Among them she sensed the whispering tread of servants’ slippers, steam rising from laundry kettles, the barbed laughter of wits and gossips, and the old-fashioned spiced perfumes of its wealthy matrons.

Underneath these rang distant melodies from other quarters of her beloved city. Clanking counting-house coins in Naos percussed against the scratching quills of Capital District scribes. Waves lapped against Dockway piers, dueting with the tapping chisels of the Golemworks. Soldiers drilled in Arvensoar Plaza, their grunts and footfalls joining the wafting strains of cornets and tambourines from raucous Lowcleft. The hunger of Rag’s End wretches crashed against the excess of Alabaster’s gourmands. Priests doubted, thieves shared their takes with beggars, and whores fell in love. Below all of these thrummed the ancient bass drone of the Irespan, the great and ruined stone bridge said to house a legion of monsters within its hollow depths.

Together the contradictions somehow made a whole—the city Luma loved, and which loved her in turn. Periodically, it proved its affections with a gift, a new trick it would teach her. A polyglot town of foreign traders, it showed her the key to understanding any language. It had taught her to borrow the jumpings of its spiders, to mantle herself in morning fog, and to always find her way.

Luma needed no such magic to reach her destination. She strode the Boulevard of Messengers, passing gilded carriages and brocaded bravos atop high-strung white steeds. On the Way of Arches, an honor guard of bleached statues loomed, dwarfing her and the city functionaries in their ink-stained tunics. Buyers and sellers choked the Avenue of Honors, and then she was turning down smaller streets, weaving through alleys with no markers to proclaim their names, led only by her flawless recollection of the city. At last the map in her head told her that she’d reached Barrel Way—Aruhal’s address as of five years ago, when he’d paid for the services she would now render.

It was a common enough scene. Here huddled residences of Magnimar’s striving class—the merchants, burghers, and brokers who fattened the city treasury and sought approval from old families like the Vetilluses, the Scarnettis, and indeed, the Derexhi. Built tall and thin, the buildings adjoined, as if uniting for support. Small plots of land in front of each served as battlegrounds for a competition of decoration. Tiny gardens overflowing with tangled, exotic flowers encroached on sparer arrangements of rocks and statues.

Luma was about to stop a hustling fat-purse in an ermine-trimmed cloak to ask where Aruhal lived when she spotted windows draped with black mourning bunting. The house that went with them hunkered like a poor relation next to its well-kept neighbors. Paint peeled from the trim. Oilskin stood in for several windowpanes. Instead of a garden or collection of stone figures, its front yard boasted only broken paving stones.

Unlatching and swinging open the rust-kissed iron gate, Luma made her way to the door. Its knocker twigged her curiosity. A metallic ring about a foot and a half in diameter, it was formed with an unusual precision. Beveled outer edges had been dulled with a file, scratching the ring’s smooth surface, and Luma guessed that they had once been razor-sharp. Clearly, knocking on doors had not been the object’s original purpose. Luma used it anyway.

After some shuffling from inside the house, the door opened a crack. Luma saw a fraction of a pale face peering out at her. The eye, like hers, was enlarged compared to a full-blooded human, but still showed a white sclera, as a full elf’s would not.

Its owner spoke in a husky rasp. “What is it?”

Luma adopted her most authoritative posture, aped from her brother Arrus. “I am Luma, of House Derexhi. May I come in?”

The Derexhi and their retainers were not official lawkeepers, but because Magnimar employed few of these, citizens sometimes treated them as such. If Luma were lucky, this woman would take the cue, overlooking the ‘quasi’ in their quasi-official status.

She didn’t. “What for?”

“Your husband hired us for a job.”

“My husband’s dead.”

“That’s why I’m here. If you let me in, I’ll explain.”

“I don’t know.” The woman, Luma saw, wasn’t so much looking at her as past her, into the street.

“You appear anxious.”

“My husband had enemies.”

“That’s what I’m here for. To protect you.” This was not so much a lie, Luma consoled herself, as something that might turn out to be true, depending.

The door swung open; Luma slipped inside.

The house smelled of yeast and cinnamon. Flour spotted an apron slung around the woman’s waist. Sweat glistened on her brow, sticking loose strains of white-blond hair to her prominent forehead. Her lips joined together in a worried bow, exposing a slight overbite. Though scarcely a judge of feminine allure, Luma reckoned that these were the sorts of imperfections that would attract rather than repel male assessment. Her beauty had a wildness about it, but it was beauty all the same.

The widow gestured Luma toward a sitting room. Luma rejected a scuffed chair in favor of a divan, tufts of batting poking through tears in its upholstery. “I know your husband’s name, but not yours,” she started.

“Seriza.” The woman stood wavering in the middle of the room, feet planted on a worn boarskin rug. “You said Aruhal hired you?”

Luma nodded. “Five years ago. You said he had enemies. Apparently he worried that one of them would do him in. So he paid us to investigate his death.”

She parted the black bunting to peer out a window. “Then you’re not here to protect me at all.”

“Why is that?”

“He wasn’t done in. It was pleurisy.”

Luma craned to try to see what Seriza was looking at, but the angle was wrong. “If he died of natural causes, why are you so fearful?”

Seriza ducked down behind a cabinet.

A loud report came from the hallway, followed by the splintering of wood and then a louder thump. Luma leapt from the divan, fingers plunging into the soft leather pouch she wore at her hip—her trickbag, containing the objects she needed to work her street magic.

A florid-cheeked dwarf clad in heavy battle gear stood in the ruins of the shattered door. He stepped into the sitting room, brandishing a jagged war-axe.

“Where is it?” he demanded.

Chapter Two: Treasure

“Where is what?” Luma asked, withdrawing her hand from her trickbag. If it came to a fight, she could reach out to Magnimar’s spires and towers, gather their memories of the lightning that struck them with every thunderstorm, and from this summon a bolt of energy to strike the dwarf down. Unlike some of her other magics, it required no props, just concentration, a gesture, and a few words of entreaty to the city. But she was here to learn, not to do battle.

“Don’t play stupid with me.” The dwarf showed a mouth full of jagged, rotting teeth. “You know very well what.” He shook his axe for emphasis.

“I would like nothing more than to understand what you’re talking about.” Luma edged in front of the cabinet behind which Seriza cowered. “Start at the beginning, maybe?”

The dwarf peered past her at the widow. “You aren’t Aruhal’s wife?”

“I am Luma of House Derexhi, hired to perform a service on his behalf.”

The intruder elevated an eyebrow. He pointed his weapon at the cabinet. “She’s the widow?”

“Lay out your grievance, dwarf.” Luma spoke evenly, her confidence steady, as it always was when her siblings weren’t watching. She’d sooner face this frothing dwarf, outweighing her by two to one and bristling with menace, than a single exasperated glance from one of her sisters. “Perhaps I can sort it out.”

“You address Jordyar, warrior of the First Stone, son of Jordgar, true inheritor of the axe of Skrellim.” He hefted it again, this time as an expression of pride. “To speak ill of the dead is not my wont. But that woman’s husband was a liar, a cheat, a betrayer, and a thief from his own friends. Did you know Aruhal?”

Luma shook her head.

“Then you missed the chance to acquaint yourself with a kill-stealer and a credit-grabber. A blasphemer against the gods, a drunkard on watch, a coward in a scrap, and a tent-farter of the worst order.”

“So you were comrades.”

Jordyar stalked over to the divan, as if wondering whether sitting would show weakness. “For three years, two decades ago, we strove together as treasure-seekers. We plumbed the depths of the Riddle Canals, scoured the Haunted Hills, and stormed the Citadel of Xerkas Xaan. But the day after our greatest triumph, he deserted us—taking the treasure with him.”

“And this treasure is what you think he had when he died?”

Warming to the subject, the dwarf puffed out his chest and paced the room, gesticulating with the axe. “Oh, what that cost us! We fought giants, demons, mind-eaters. Upon entering the Demonsweald’s innermost crypt, the best of us all, Corin the Bright, was beheaded by a trap. Which Aruhal thereupon disarmed.” Jordyar stomped into the hallway, then returned, holding aloft the strange doorknocker that had tweaked Luma’s curiosity on her way in. “This! This is the flying ring that sliced through Corin’s neck. I can’t believe that he would take that and display it on his door, as if mocking the memory—” A frustrated groan caught in Jordyar’s throat. He backhanded the ring away; it lodged, quivering, in the wooden lintel of the sitting room’s doorway. A fresh flush of crimson rose through his face. “So yes, Aruhal owes me. This treasure, we had a deal to sell it for a wagonload of gold. Enough to forever conclude my grubbing and sweating, sleeping in cold crypts with the doors spiked shut, fighting for rest as ghouls and bloodsuckers scratch at the sill. To retire for good and all, on the one great score every looter dreams of. That is the life Jordyar deserved. The life that Aruhal plucked from my grasp!”

He lunged at the cabinet where Seriza quietly wept.

Luma stepped up, her sickle drawn. After a moment of tension, the dwarf relented, sticking his axe in his belt. He stretched out open hands, as if ready to grab Luma by the front of her tunic. His eyes glistened. “You must let me question her. He must have told her. Our customer never bought it from him.”

“Or so they told you,” Luma ventured.

Jordyar wiped his nose with the back of his liver-spotted hand. “Or so they did. But they say that even now they will buy it, if I can produce it. It changes nothing—he either sold it and has the gold, or kept it. And it is mine.”

“And if he did keep it, what is it, exactly? A magical relic?”

“Scarcely. A historical curio—a reliquary containing the ashes and bones of a saint: the holy warrior Lovag. A globe of gold, studded with gems. It would be worth much to a collector, but more to the church.”

“Which church?”

Jordyar’s glory days are behind him.

Jordyar’s snort sent spittle flying. “So you can sell it to them when you find it? You take me for a fool, girl.” He twitched, as if realizing he’d given away too much already by naming the saint.

“I’m not here for this treasure,” Luma said. “I’m here to find out who killed Aruhal.”

“No one killed Aruhal,” Seriza sobbed, white fingers clutched around the cabinet. “I told you that already. It was pleurisy—a pain when he breathed. It just got worse, until…” She trailed off into another burst of tears.

Jordyar angled for a better view of her. “You look a pretty creature. You don’t propose to tell me a wretch like Aruhal caught a wench like you without a great bag of gold swinging over his shoulder?”

The widow’s face froze into a wordless plea directed at Luma. Its meaning was clear: please get him out of here.

Luma again stepped between the widow and the dwarf. “It sounds like you had all the reason in the world to kill Aruhal.”

“You speak truth there.” He spat onto the bare floor, just missing the boar’s hide rug.

Luma crossed her arms. “But you want me to believe you didn’t.”

“I’m done answering your questions. That one will tell me where it is—gold or relic, I’m taking it now.”

“I don’t know anything about any relic,” Seriza sniffled. “And as for gold—look around you. I can’t see how I’ll afford to fix that door.”

“Aruhal never had money?” the dwarf asked.

“A little. At first. He worked as a locksmith. It wasn’t money I loved him for.”

Jordyar bellowed out a laugh. “Then he was holding out on you, too.”

Luma crowded him. “So why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I what?”

“Kill him.”

Trepidation flashed across the dwarf’s face. “I’m not the swine he was.” He flexed his shoulders, regaining his composure.

Luma twined a lock of her hair between her fingers—a habit her family’s scolding had never quite cured her of. “I don’t think that’s it.”

“Matters not to me what you think.” Jordyar knocked on the nearest wall. “I should tear this place apart.”

“You’re not going to do that,” Luma said.

Jordyar stiffened. “Is that so?”

Luma let her fingers brush against her trickbag.

The dwarf took it in. “A magicker, are we? What kind?”

“You don’t want to find out,” said Luma. Depending on how tough the dwarf was, it was either a well-calibrated act of intimidation, or a reckless bluff.

Jordyar wove past her to address Seriza. “This is all a shock to you. Your husband dying and now this.” He gestured to the broken door as if it were a catastrophe unconnected to himself. “I approached this too strong, didn’t I? I believe you when you say you had no inkling of the relic. Or the gold your rodent of a spouse sold it for. So I’m telling you this.” He jabbed his leather-gloved finger at her. “You cogitate long and hard on where Aruhal might have stashed a pile of gold, or a treasure about yay big.” With open hands about a foot apart, he mimed a roughly globular object. “Because there’s no chance in hell that he doesn’t have it. Maybe he tried to tell you, when he was sick. Search your mind for clues of that nature. Because in forty-eight hours, I’ll be back, and I’ll take what Aruhal stole from me. Or you’ll have more to mourn than your husband. Understand?”

Seriza said nothing—a rabbit transfixed by a snake.

He poked Luma’s shoulder. “And if you want to test your spells against my axe then, you’re welcome to try.” He stamped for the door, reclaiming the sharpened ring from the lintel on the way out.

Luma rushed to the window. Jordyar had turned westward, toward a main thoroughfare, the Avenue of Honors. He proceeded with the attentive uncertainty of a visitor. Consulting her mental map of the city, Luma plotted a route of alleyways. If she got going right away, she might well beat him to the high street, and trail him unseen from there. She plunged into Seriza’s kitchen and out the back exit. The widow called after her, either asking why she was following the dwarf, or asking who would pay for the door. Luma didn’t attempt a reply.

On the second question, it was not up to the Derexhi family to pay Jordyar’s reparations. As to the first, the old adventurer knew more than he was saying. Were there anything here to investigate, the path to it could well lead through him. Missing treasure certainly sounded like a motive for murder.

There was more to hear from the widow, too, but that would have to wait. Luma knew where to find her.

Reaching the Avenue, she spotted Jordyar’s head bobbing between a pair of laggardly porters carrying wine crates for a doddering master. Luma wished she had her brother Ontor with her—shadowing was both safer and easier with two. Still, her street-honed instincts kept the dwarf in sight, and he showed little propensity for looking back. The fat-purses and liveried servants who populated the street at this hour gave wide berth to her battle-ready, fuming subject. Picking up speed as he stomped along, he passed hawkers, criers, and store guards, merchants, traders, and grandees. He traversed the length of the avenue, turning at the Pediment Building and continuing down the long stone slope that served as the bypass for the Seacleft, the great cliff dividing the city into high and low, the Summit and the Shore.

From its base, the dwarf wended through the clamorous Bazaar of Sails, bypassing stalls and skirting around tents. A trio of urchins, in the sparkling glad-rags of the Varisian minority, chased a fist-sized jewel bug into his path. Jordyar roared at them, sending them scattering. Luma halted; his swivel to shout curses at the children placed her in his line of sight. But he seemed not to notice her, and continued on. Heedless of Luma’s pursuit, he plunged into Dockway’s narrow streets, lined by salt-crusted depots and sturdy taverns.

Abruptly abandoning her chase, Luma darted into an alleyway between an alehouse and a whorehouse and drew her sickle. As soon as she was past its threshold, she pressed her back against the crumbling brick of the tavern wall. A rake-thin man clad all in black, from boots to leggings to tunic to skullcap, hustled in after her. She thrust out the sickle, wrapping its curving edge around his ankle. As she pulled it up, she twisted the blade, so that it would trip him without cutting into his leg. He fell into the wall, bashing his snowy-bearded chin against the brick, and tumbled to the ground. Luma leapt onto his back, pinning him with her knee, and pressed her blade around his throat, positioned for a slaughtering cut.

“Who are you?” she asked, “and why are you following me?”

Chapter Three: Old Comrades

The trim, white-haired man responded with seasoned stillness to Luma’s knee and sickle. His foreign-accented voice purred soothingly, with a hint of disarming irony. “Who am I and why I am I following you? I might equally ask whose blade caresses my jugular.”

“Depending on your answer,” Luma replied, “I might tell you.” She glanced at the alleyway’s mouth. The street it jutted onto was not such a quiet one. This was in Dockway, where most folk would note a waylaying in an alley and keep going, unblinking. But trouble only took one busybody.

Prominent veins ran like engorged streams across the man’s papery, spotted hands. Around his wrist coiled a silver chain bearing a charm—a rat perched on a raft. From her reading, Luma vaguely recalled this as the symbol of an obscure river god from the faraway River Kingdoms. The man was likely a priest, able to call down magic from his deity, much as Luma did from the city itself.

“What would you say, young lady, if I told you I wasn’t following you?”

Luma couldn’t help finding him likeable—and resenting people who projected charm so readily. “I’m not that young, and a lady only by the skin of my nails.”

“When you get to my age, you’ll consider everyone young. And I wasn’t following you, I was following the dwarf.”

“Jordyar.”

“You’ve met my truculent former colleague, then. Honestly, my dear, let me up. We may discover common goals.”

“Introduce yourself first.”

“I am Rieslan, once known as Rieslan the Drowner, now sadly diminished.”

Luma relaxed the pressure of her knee on his spine. “And let me guess. You went with Jordyar and Aruhal into the Demonsweald, in search of a valuable reliquary.”

Rieslan sighed. “He told you about that, did he? Dear fellow’s grown talkative in his dotage.”

“I’m going to let you up, Rieslan. Try anything and you’ll—”

“No need to complete the threat,” said the river cleric. “I’ve had a long career, and heard them all.”

Luma got up, her sickle still ready. “You shadowed him in case he was pursued?”

Rieslan rose, brushing gravel from his leggings. “That’s what I thought you were doing, my dear. Jordyar and I have had a falling out, shall we say, since the old days. I know why I’m chasing him. Why are you?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” Luma said, watching him rub his creaking finger joints. “I suppose you’ve heard that, too.”

The old priest twinkled at her. “Very well.”

“I care about the reliquary only insofar as it might have led to my client’s murder.”

“Your client?” Rieslan interjected. “You work for Aruhal’s estate?”

Luma nodded.

Rieslan steadied himself against the wall. “Someone might have hastened his demise for it. But it wouldn’t be me. Or Jordyar, for that matter.”

“Why not?”

“Haven’t you found it notable that we waited till we got word of Aruhal’s death to come for it? He had a curse placed on himself. Whosoever slays Aruhal will himself be slain.” The priest studied Luma’s expression. “You look like someone who’s just had an epiphany.”

Luma flushed. She hated it when others saw through her. “How did you hear of this curse?”

“He sent a messenger, to warn us, back when we still stalked him for our share of the loot.”

“He told you he had a curse placed on himself, and you accepted it as truth?”

Rieslan held his hands together, as if in prayer. “I asked my god, Hanspur, and was told it was true.”

“But, as in the way of gods, received no clearer details.”

Rieslan winced.

“What is it?” Luma asked.

He waved her question away. “I get headaches. It is nothing.”

“So you and your comrades—”

“Former comrades,” Rieslan said.

“You all waited until you learned of his death, then came for the treasure. How did you hear of it?”

“Naphrax posted a spy, who sent word that Aruhal was sick. Jordyar had Naphrax’s dogsbody in his pay, and so learned that Naphrax had broken from his seclusion and was bound for Magnimar. And of course I have been keeping an eye on Jordyar.”

“This Naphrax, he’s your party’s other survivor? Let me guess—a wizard?”

A vein pulsed on Rieslan’s forehead. “Sorcerer, but let’s not make fine distinctions.”

A spell-slinger complicated the possibilities. He might have found a way to break the curse, and killed Aruhal off despite it. But then, why wait until he was sick?

Luma caught herself playing with her hair again and stopped. “Let see where that leaves us. I don’t care about the treasure. You have no particular reason to protect Aruhal’s killer—if indeed he was killed at all. Does that about sum it up?”

Rieslan crinkled aged dimples at her. “Much gold is at stake. You’ll excuse me if I greet your disinterest in it with a certain skepticism.”

Luma, affronted, tried to cover it up with a smile. “Ask around about the Derexhi family. Our reputation for honesty is worth more than your treasure.”

Rieslan is charming—which doesn’t make him innocent.

“A thousand pardons, my dear.”

Don’t call me dear, Luma wanted to say. “At any rate, we have each spoiled the other’s attempt to follow Jordyar. I suggest we part, with no hard feelings.”

The priest bowed deep, and went on his way.

Luma signaled to her brother Ontor, who for several minutes had been standing across the way. He’d appeared in her peripheral vision, sauntering down the street, looking for her. Seeing her occupied, he’d dropped into a pose, engaging in conversation with loitering dockworkers.

It never surprised Luma to see one of her siblings appear out of the blue like this. Her sister Iskola could see from afar, and whisper into distant ears. Wherever she was in Magnimar, one of the others could always find her.

Ontor required no further instructions. Adopting a languid lope, he pushed off after Rieslan.

Iskola’s spells didn’t permit them to communicate with one another, so Luma would find a rendezvous and wait. She ambled for the closest of the Derexhi haunts, a spot named after its proprietor, Chanda, who specialized in bream broth and walnut bread. Luma claimed the darkest corner, where Chanda, unbidden, brought her soup, half a loaf of the bread, and a bowl of sea snails in red garlic sauce. Luma paid Chanda the usual premium for a lengthy stay and settled in.

An hour later, Ontor slid into the seat across from her, a sea snail bowl already in one hand and a half-filled ale flagon in the other. “You’ll be happy to hear I was also deemed too much a black sheep for the Vitellus job.”

Family politics could wait, Luma decided. There was a mystery to solve. Even if the answer was that there was no mystery at all. “Where did he go?”

Ontor threw his head back, dropped a sea snail in, and swallowed, pleased with his show of downmarket manners. The stevedores filling the restaurant ate the same way. “He’s staking out a hovel down in Rag’s End. Waiting for someone to show. Since I have no idea of the situation, I figured I’d come and collect you, and we’d check the place out together.”

Luma dunked a final bread crust into the remnants of her broth.

Ontor wiped ale-foam from his lips. “That was a hint, by the way. A request for context.”

Luma briefed him on the case to date: the prearranged, posthumous assignment; the widow and her pleurisy story; Jordyar the dwarf and then Rieslan the river-cleric and their tangled, treacherous history with Aruhal.

Ontor gobbled the rest of his food. “So you reckon this Rieslan knows where Jordyar is staying, and, having lost him in Dockway, has gone there to wait for him?”

Luma hadn’t so reckoned, but would have, given one more moment’s thought. The two half-siblings set out for Rag’s End.

∗∗∗

As ramshackle as its name suggested, Rag’s End stretched out before them as an expanse of hovels and shanties. Luma and Ontor strode with dispatch past a crowd gathered for an impromptu match between a mastiff and a crab spider half again its size. Sensing a form of authority approaching, the bettors hunched and turned their faces away. A jagged laneway sloped gently into a depression. As Ontor led Luma down its length, a gathering fog grew from scattered wisps to an obscuring mass.

At the end of the cul-de-sac a two-story structure held itself with lordly remove from the surrounding shacks. To its left, a cloud of flies buzzed around a heap of rotting trash. Piles of rubble, wood and masonry mostly, formed an unintended fence around the building’s right side.

“That’s where your old duffer was waiting,” Ontor said.

Luma peered into the twilight. There was no immediate sign of Rieslan now. Lamplight issued from an open window facing the debris wall.

“He’s either gone in,” Ontor whispered, “or gone entirely. But someone must be in there.” He wasn’t so much stating the obvious as asking: do we go in and see?

In reply, Luma nodded. Hunching, the two of them covered the distance to the wall, and then to the side of the house.

Luma let in the citysong, hearing the whispers and shushes of the billowing fog. Cozened by her spell, it pooled around them, its protective mantle blending naturally with the mist flowing through the neighborhood. They could see into the house, while anyone looking out would see only swirling vapor.

Inside Luma saw two familiar individuals, and two unfamiliar.

Jordyar sat atop a wooden table, picking at his rotting teeth with his fingers. Rieslan slumped in a chair, shoved in a corner. Ropes bound his waist, arms, and ankles. Wet blood reddened his goatee. His divine charm, with its rat and raft motif, swung from a rafter, a good twenty feet away. Without it, Luma knew, he wouldn’t be able to shape his appeals to the realms beyond, and would receive no magic from his god.

A second, much younger man was also tied to a chair, this one positioned in the center of the room. Muscular and tanned, he would have been handsome, prior to the beating he’d taken. His face swelled and purpled; scorched holes in his tunic revealed burned skin beneath. Still conscious, the man seemed to be willing himself to pass out, and failing at it.

Over him stood a creased, leathery man dressed in a suede robe dotted with turquoise and agate beads. He wore a vest with no shirt beneath it, showing off the puffy muscles of a fit but elderly man. Greasy black hair hung straight from his scalp down to his shoulders. A long mustache drooped from his upper lip to his protruding clavicles.

He grunted at Jordyar, who approached him carrying a poker, which he held out at arm’s length with the aid of his thick hide glove. The mustached man spoke arcane syllables, evoking a cone-shape blast of flame, which flew from his fingertips to the poker. The poker’s iron tip glowed red.

“Please,” the prisoner sobbed. “I’m begging you.”

Jordyar hefted the red-hot poker. “You’re doing to this yourself, Gaval.”

Gaval shuddered. “I can’t tell you anything about it. Seriza never mentioned such a thing! And Aruhal—I barely spoke a hundred words to him my entire life. I’m just an apothecary.”

Jordyar’s partner—who had to be the sorcerer, Naphrax—turned to the terrified young man in the chair. “Tell us,” he said.

The dwarf advanced with the poker.

“Tell us,” repeated Naphrax.

Chapter Four: Reckoning

“Need I remind you?” Naphrax asked his prisoner.

Tears further wet Gaval’s bloodied cheeks. “Of what?”

“Of what we know.”

“You’re wrong.”

Jordyar jabbed the poker in Gaval’s face. “You’ve replaced Aruhal in his comely wife’s bed, haven’t you?”

Gaval held his chin up. “I love Seriza, and Seriza loves me. That doesn’t mean I’ve heard of this treasure.”

“She spoke nothing of it?” Naphrax snorted.

Outrage stirred Gaval from his agonized stupor. “She and Aruhal had nothing. She’ll be better off with my takings, humble as they are!”

“Liar,” Naphrax spat.

Holding the poker out of sight behind him, the dwarf sidled up to Gaval, grimacing out a rotten-toothed smile. “What Aruhal did to us is not your fault, boy. But by standing in our way, feeding us ridiculous untruths, it becomes your fault. Don’t you see that?”

“How many times do I have to tell you?”

“If you won’t spill,” Naphrax said, “we’ll take the woman, and do the same to her.”

Jordyar pressed the glowing poker to the prisoner’s leg. Gaval screamed, the smoke of burning fabric giving way to the steam of blackening flesh.

At the window, Ontor looked to Luma, his expression asking: are we going to let this happen?

Luma waved him to silence, then reached into the citysong for the vein of venom that pulsed below the city’s skin. Magnimar’s settlers brought with them their Chelish tradition of settling affairs with arsenic, belladonna, and kingsleep. Luma took in this dark harmony and projected it outward, to the blood-spotted tunic worn by the howling Gaval. In this town, to hear that a man was an apothecary was to think not only of healing, but its opposite.

Luma’s magic-inflamed senses confirmed it: tiny speckles of poison dotted his tunic, were ground as grime into his fingerprints. She couldn’t tell what variety, with so little of it still left. But she would bet it was the kind that made an already sick man die from seeming natural causes–of pleurisy, say.

“We need him,” said Luma. With a turn of her head she indicated an opposite window, not far from the second imprisoned man, the cleric Rieslan. “It will help if you can get him free–that will make it three against two.”

Ontor nodded and was gone. Moments later she saw him appear at the other window. Jordyar once more laid the poker on Gaval, this time applying it to his chest. Naphrax watched with stoic attention. Fully occupied by Gaval’s shrieking and squirming, neither man noticed Ontor’s acrobatic contortions as he fit himself, legs first, through the tiny window. He dropped to the floor with a muffled thud that at last turned their heads, but only in time to see him draw his knife and slash open the ropes binding Rieslan. Then he bounded up to grab the holy symbol from the rafter, tossed it to the priest, and threw his knife at Naphrax. The spellcaster only barely managed to duck out of the way, yet the blade succeeded in interrupting his gesticulations and spoiling whatever spell he meant to cast.

Luma, meanwhile, shifted her awareness to another vault of the city’s memory. Her mind traveled to the spires and rooftops, from the heights of the Arvensoar barracks tower to the great stone snake encircling the Hippodrome. From the mystic vibrations of these structures she pulled out the countless times they’d been struck by lightning. Converting them from past thought to present memory, she brought into being a vertical bolt of blue energy. It materialized above the dwarf, striking the crown of his bald head. He sizzled and convulsed, the poker flying out of his hands.

Naphrax started to cast a spell at her, but Rieslan, holy symbol clutched between gnarled fingers, came up behind him, chanting. He shoved his hand past the sorcerer’s vest and onto his bare skin. A swirl of angry energy shunted from the old priest’s fingers into Naphrax’s breastbone. The sorcerer staggered back, clutching his chest, his arm going stiff.

A wolfish look came over the priest. “That sluggish heart of yours can’t take another of those. Can it, Naphrax?”

“I should have killed you in Kaer Maga,” said the sorcerer, sweating.

“I should have killed you in that awful tavern, the moment we met,” said Rieslan.

Jordyar, his clothes still steaming slightly, staggered and reached for his axe, positioning himself for a lunge against Ontor. Luma called down another lightning bolt, striking him as before, and he dropped to one knee, panting.

Luma crawled through her window, a few last tendrils of summoned fog purling away from her. “Are we done here, gentlemen?”

Naphrax still hadn’t caught his breath. “He hasn’t told us.”

Ontor cut Gaval’s bonds.

The freed prisoner rose, quaking; Luma indicated his soiled trousers. “You terrified him. You think he wouldn’t have sold out the widow in a heartbeat, if he thought it would spare him?”

Gaval struggled to form words. “I take exception to—”

Luma cut him off. “This is not a good time for you to talk.”

He hung his head.

“My brother and I,” Luma said, “are leaving, with Gaval. He and I have a separate matter to discuss. What the three of you do is of no concern to us. You have nothing to gain from further hostilities, and would not prevail. Are we agreed, or shall I punctuate that with a lightning bolt?”

“Agreed,” grunted Naphrax. The others said nothing, so, each holding one of the quaking man’s arms, Luma and Ontor withdrew–through the front door, this time.

“Where do you live, apothecary?” Luma asked.

“Above my uncle’s shop, in Vista.”

To the southeast lay the Seerspring Gardens, where they could hire a hansom, and get him to his home in the Summit.

“So,” said Luma, “let me guess. When you began to console her, Seriza was not yet a widow.”

“I would never…” Gaval tried to pull away, but she held him tight, as did her brother.

“If we ask her neighbors how often they saw you around before Aruhal died, will they tell the same story?”

Gaval slumped into her. “Very well. But I beg your discretion. Calumnize me all you like, but spare the lady’s reputation.”

As they crossed an intersection, Luma saw a lurker one street down, paralleling their progress. She stopped and waved Rieslan over. The river-priest hesitated, then complied, his gait sheepish. “Never was much for sneaking,” he said, joining the others.

“That was Aruhal’s job,” said Luma, moving on. “Your old comrades have patched up their grievances, it would seem.”

Rieslan fell into step, at her elbow. “It won’t last. Are you sure you haven’t guessed where the treasure is?”

She shook her head; lying was easier when confined to gesture alone. “When did the four of you have your falling out, precisely?”

“We learned to hate one another long before the Demonsweald. But it was after we captured the reliquary that Naphrax and Jordyar decided it would be better if Aruhal were cut out of the deal.”

Luma raised her faint auburn eyebrow. “And you had nothing to do with that?”

Rieslan made a sour face. “Let’s say, I absented myself from discussions.”

“A sin of omission, then.”

The old priest laughed. “My god hungers for the last breaths of the drowning. His moral demands are flexible.”

“And how did they inform Aruhal of the new arrangement?”

“With axe and spell.” The priest’s chuckle suggested that it hardly needed saying.

“One more question,” said Luma. “Who researched this treasure? Aruhal?”

“Another correct surmise, my dear.”

They parted with him at the gardens, and rode with Gaval in the cab. As soon as he was seated, the tortured man passed out.

“You were good back there,” said Ontor.

Nothing phases Ontor—not even death.

If only the others had seen it, thought Luma. Maybe Ontor would tell them. She considered asking him to, but knew it would spoil the effect.

Arriving at Derexhi House, Luma went straight to the library, which smelled of leather, wine, and her father’s olibanum cologne. Muttering curses at Randred’s haphazard reshelving habits, she hunted until she found the folio labeled “Acts and Legends of the Holy.” Giving silent thanks for its alphabetical arrangement, she found the entry for the holy warrior Lovag, whose reliquary had so muddled her assignment. To Ontor she read aloud:

“And Lovag was betrayed by his companions, and slain. Lo, his last loyal servants did burn his body and entomb his bones, placing it in a golden reliquary. Even reduced to ashes, Lovag’s passion for the justice of his great god Aroden burned bright. When the traitor priests beheld the shining vessel, he rose from his celestial rest to smite them.”

“What does that mean?” her brother asked.

Luma closed the book with a thump. “It means I think we just found the treasure they’ve all been looking for.”

∗∗∗

In the marbled mausoleum, Luma and Ontor searched the shelves for Aruhal’s name. Near the iron-gated entrance, a callow attendant held himself in a posture of bland discretion. He held in his hand the document authorizing the disinterment.

“Grave-robbing’s just not the same when you have the deceased’s permission,” Ontor whispered.

Luma found the brass nameplate bearing the client’s name. With the key supplied by the attendant, she opened the wood-paneled door to Aruhal’s niche. Inside rested a large ceramic urn. Luma removed it and set it on the marble table in the middle of the crypt’s vestibule, where flowers and offerings of incense were placed.

“That’s not made of gold,” Ontor said. “I thought the book said Lovag’s reliquary was made of gold?”

Luma pulled out her sickle and bashed its hilt against the urn. The porcelain crumbled into shards, revealing the golden, gem-encrusted reliquary hidden within.

Ontor addressed the attendant. “You must have seen this when you poured the ashes in. Aruhal trusted you not to switch it?”

The crypt-keeper placed a hand over his heart. “Terrible oaths to the death-goddess bar us from such chicanery.”

Again Luma opened her mind to the strain of citysong that ran thick with toxin. She wasn’t sure if the spell would work on a man’s ashes, but it did–they lit up with the same malicious speckles she’d perceived on Gaval’s tunic.

She smiled. “Got you,” she whispered.

∗∗∗

Seriza and Gaval perched together, agitated, spines straight, on the edge of the divan in the widow’s sitting room. Though the swelling had gone down on his face, Gaval still showed the signs of his beating and torture the day before. Luma almost felt pity for them. If they’d been smart, they wouldn’t be here, but rather on a boat to anywhere else right this moment.

“So the dwarf was right?” Seriza said, trembling. “Aruhal did have a treasure after all?”

Luma gestured to the furniture crate she’d pressed into service as temporary transport for the urn. “As I said in my message, he left an inheritance. But we were to perform an investigation before giving it to you.”

They deserved this, she reminded herself. When Aruhal discarded the saint’s remains to make room for his own, he no doubt assumed it would be his erstwhile companions who’d face this fate. To be murdered for the oldest reason of all–a spouse clearing the way for a new lover–felt too cheap, too ordinary, for the complex effort Aruhal had expended for his prearranged revenge.

Luma hauled loose the crate’s lid. She picked up the urn and placed it in front of Aruhal’s killers, setting it down on a low table.

Seriza lit up with avarice; she squeezed Gaval’s hand, squealing her delight. Her excitement overcame his wariness, and he reached out to caress the urn’s lid.

Bursts of green steam vented from holes in the urn. The widow and her lover reared back as the unearthly vapor coalesced into a blob of floating ectoplasm, and then into an eerie, translucent specter in the shape of an old man. It surging through the urn and table into Gaval, where bony fingers unfurled and locked around the startled man’s throat.

Gaval’s skin whitened and flaked; his hair turned from brown to gray to shocking white. His face a mask of terror, he pitched over onto the divan, drained of life. The groaning spirit then turned on Seriza.

“No!” the widow shrieked, scrabbling backward on the couch. “Not you!”

Then all words were cut off by those glowing, ephemeral fingers. For a moment, the sitting room was filled with the sound of flailing limbs—and then two corpses lay on the divan.

The spirit twisted, spiraling toward Luma, who prepared herself to call down lightning against it. As it hung in the air before her, its contorted face calmed. Then the entire apparition dissipated and was gone.

Luma waited until it was clear that the manifestation had concluded, then called out to the man hidden in the hope chest behind the divan. “I thought you weren’t much for sneaking.”

“You detected my presence, did you?” Rieslan lifted the lid and poked his head out. He stared at the urn, still sitting on the low table.

Luma put her hands on her hips. “Do you want it? It should go back to the mausoleum, but my family wasn’t hired to protect it forever. Our contract is complete.”

Rieslan scratched at his beard. “Those are Aruhal’s ashes in there, and not the saint’s?”

“That’s right.”

“That quite diminishes its value. Still…” He reached out for the urn—then pulled up short, gazing at the shriveled corpses splayed on the divan. “You know, I think I’ve abruptly lost my desire for this object.” He unfolded the rest of long frame out of the chest and stepped around the couch. He doffed his skullcap and bowed to Luma.

“To your health, my lady.”

Then he let himself out.

When he’d been gone for a slow count of ten, the door to the kitchen swung open. Ontor, hand on the hilt of a knife, sauntered in and leaned over the two ash-skinned corpses, inspecting their terrified expressions. “So the old priest left without making a play for it, huh?”

“He’s apparently learned a new appreciation for caution.”

Ontor whistled. “I guess you’re never too old to learn, but still—what do you want to bet that in a few days we hear reports of an old sorcerer and a bald dwarf found dead in Aruhal’s crypt?”

“I won’t put any money against that,” Luma said, but her mind wasn’t on the banter. Inside, she was already thinking of the praise she would receive when they returned home—from her father, who would give it willingly, and from the rest of her siblings, who would finally be able to see what an indispensable part of the team she was. Even they would have to admit that she’d executed the mission to perfection.

Surely they would.